Comicsreview

Every once in a while a comic comes along that tugs at your heartstrings and flushes out your tear ducts. Blankets. Persepolis. Pride of Baghdad. I recently read one of those comics. It’s called What You Don’t Get, written and drawn by indie comic creator Anne Thalheimer. This book follows a semi-autobiographical track, following Anne from high school through college and into adulthood, focusing on the impact of an event that forever altered the course of her life: a double homicide at Simon's Rock College on Dec 13, 1992.

Gamingblurb

As of today, you can pay what you want for DRM free, Mac/PC/Linux versions of Rochard, Shatter, Space Pirates and Zombies, Torchlight, and Vessel. If you pay above the average, Dustforce also becomes available. Many of these games make their Linux and Mac debuts with this announcement. UPDATE: Gratuitous Space Battles, Bit.Trip Runner, Wizorb, and Jamestown have been added.

Gamingblurb

The Ouya project on Kickstarter announced today that the video game streaming service On-Live would be made available for the open source platform. This will bring a wide selection of high profile games to playability on the Ouya from the start. Also, the full controller design has been unveiled!

Gamingfeature

Game “biz” veteran Julie Uhrman (formerly at GameFly and IGN) has assembled a team to create a $99 Android-based home console. The project, now seeking $950,000 through Kickstarter, would allow indie game developers broader access to their audiences’ living rooms with fewer barriers to entry. As of this writing, it’s raised over $3.5 million in less than two days.

Ouya is meant to be an open console where games and game development are cheap and easy for everyone, without costly or prohibitive distribution channels (each Ouya console is also a developer kit). Although indie games have become more popular and accessible in recent years, entering the living room has been a challenge. At a low price point ($99), and with the requirement that all games be at least free to try, Ouya hopes to allow such games to penetrate a market where Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have traditionally dominated.

Gamingfeature

No, not just E3. For the last few years, we, the Real Gamers, have been in a constant state of underwhelmed. We watch as Microsoft makes Mountain Dew-Halo tie-ins, and Sony does some augmented reality gimmick with a camera and a book on your rug and Nintendo mutates their controllers ever further in hopes of surprising us into buying new hardware and we have to wonder: who is this stuff for?

It’s clearly not for us. We want interesting game mechanics, well-told stories, solid control schemes. Games that do things that are fun and new, that we haven’t played a thousand times before. Games like Portal. Or Minecraft. Or Phoenix Wright. Or any other game that hasn’t been dumbed down so that “anyone can enjoy it”. Is that so much to ask?

Gaming
// Movies & TVblurb

The movie, currently rated at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, is an hour, thirty-six minute documentary film about independent game developers Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes (Super Meat Boy), Phil Fish (FEZ), and Jonathon Blow (Braid) and their efforts to make games. It's been highly praised by critics in and out of the games industry, and definitely worth your time. It costs $9.99.